Get to know » Students » Life and environment:
Parental qualification
Students were asked to indicate their parents’ highest level of education against a list of nationally appropriate educational levels to ensure local relevance. Each of these levels was also mapped to International Standard Classification Levels (ISCED 2011) so that consistent comparisons across countries could be made.
Highest levels of parental education
As seen in Table STT1.3, less than 50% of students reported at least one of their parents’ highest levels of education was above secondary education and 26% of students had at least one parent with a university education.
University-level parental education and student performance
This information was compared with student achievement in the PILNA assessments. To simplify the analysis, parents’ highest level of education was grouped into two categories: below university level and university level. Table STT1.4 shows student performance in the PILNA domains by their parents’ highest level of education.
From Table STT1.4 we see that in both year levels for the writing domain, students who had at least one parent with a university level education had higher average writing performance than students who did not.
In the numeracy and reading domains, trends were less clear. For reading, year six students who had at least one parent with a university level education tended to score higher than those who did not but there were no differences at the year four level. For numeracy, there were no differences at the year six level but year four students who had at least one parent with a university level education tended to score lower than those who did not.
What does this mean?
Students who have at least one university educated parent tended to score higher in the writing domain than students without a university educated parent. There may be an association between parental education and writing performance.
Other results were unclear and, also, contradictory. Results in the reading domain suggest there may be an association between parental education and reading performance but only at the year six level. Results in the numeracy domain suggest that year four students with university educated parents score lower in numeracy than their peers.
